Have you ever tried to handle those little peanut-shaped Styrofoam pieces?

Of course you have - when you reach in a box to grab some they jump out of your fingers and skip across the floor, dispersing into your garden, onto the street, and everywhere else. If you're lucky, a few may even wind up in your trash can.

That's how easily Styrofoam - a plastic also known as polystyrene - finds its way to any body of water then downstream to the ocean. And that's why it's turning up as a common item in beach cleanups as well as a component of the 14 billion pounds of waste that ends up in the ocean each year, 80 percent of that comes from land and 90 percent consists of plastics.

Katsuhiko Saido, a chemist with the College of Pharmacy at Japan's Nihon University, led a team of scientists that collected water samples from India, Japan, Europe and the United States. They reported to a 2009 meeting of the American Chemical Society that all their samples contained polystyrene and its byproducts.

Once washed out to sea it's rapidly broken down by the wind, sun and salt water. Photo-degradation, as it's called, produces smaller pieces which retain their ability to absorb toxins. The pieces can be eaten by wildlife, believing that it's real food, with deadly consequences.

While most plastics are produced from complex molecules called polymers, polystyrene foam is a form of plastic made from a simpler monomer called styrene. More than 13 billion pounds of styrene were produced in the U.S. in 2006 and about 65 percent of that was used to manufacture polystyrene. Expanded polystyrene, or EPS, is what results when air is pumped into the material.

EPS can be reused for a second life in products such as construction materials, but recycling it can be maddeningly difficult. Just look at the example of the Santa Cruz Chapter of the Surfrider Foundation, which held a recycling drive over the 2008 winter holidays that after much public outreach and hard work generated a huge pile of the stuff.

Sarah Damron, central coast coordinator for the Surfrider Foundation says the project's intent was to keep as much polystyrene generated during the holiday season out of the landfill and ocean as possible, and to engage the community in the effort.

Santa Cruz Surfrider Chapter Chairman Dustin Macdonald said he remembers that the group organized two, four hour collection days. "The only way we knew it would work is if we could get a recycler to pick it up since it's not cost effective to recycle polystyrene foam due to its light weight," he told me.

After making several calls but having no luck, Macdonald called in a favor from a friend with a warehouse in Watsonville where chapter volunteers took the foam to be sorted. A group of 15 of them spent a day sorting all of the foam, filling a 40-foot trailer which then took it to a recycling facility in the central valley. "Without the free transport to the recycler in Lodi and the free sorting facility it could never have happened," he explained. "The stuff is just not that valuable in light weight foam form."

"The most common items seemed to be various wine and Omaha steaks shipping materials, with peanuts coming in third," he added. You can see a musical video synopsis of the Surfrider Foundation's Santa Cruz Chapter's "Get The Foam Out" recycling effort here:

http://www.macdonalddesign.com/files/surfrider/GTFO%20complete.avi.

Since then, polystyrene take-back program called Waste To Waves has been developed which you can learn more about at http://wastetowaves.org/.

Macdonald says the Surfrider and Waste To Wave's efforts are intended to re-use a product originally intended for one time use. "The recycled foam would be used for rulers, picture frames, crown molding, home insulation and of course surfboards!" Macdonald said.

In the meantime, hard to handle polystyrene keeps flowing to the sea on a daily basis.

Dan Haifley is executive director of O'Neill Sea Odyssey. He can be reached at dhaifley@oneillseaodyssey.org.